John Pocock’s Histories of Historiography

Abstract

J. G. A. Pocock is well known as a historian of political thought, less appreciated as a historian of historiography. This article seeks to redress the balance by examining his writings as histories of historiography. The main focus is on his major works, but the article also covers relevant essays, and in particular the series of late essays addressed to ‘the politics of historiography’. It is argued that while Pocock supposed from the first that historiography and political thought were connected, how he understood the connection shifted as his work developed. In The Ancient Constitution the focus was on the political implications of historiographic innovation; but in The Machiavellian Moment, the subject was a new understanding of the politics of historical time. Barbarism and Religion brought historical narratives to the fore, exploring the many different narratives which can be identified as Gibbon’s ‘contexts’. Narratives were likewise key to Pocock’s late essays on the politics of historiography, but here the focus was on narratives which support sovereign statehood. This focus was tied to his fear that the dominant narratives of British and New Zealand history were under threat, the one from Europeanisation, the other from the claims of the Maori.